Edward Thomas, the poet who died in the First World War, is the subject of this blog and of my novel, A Conscious Englishman. It is about Thomas, his wife Helen, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others of the period, and about nature, place and poetry.
'Margaret Keeping's inhabitation of Edward, Robert, Helen and their world is tender and subtle...a lovely novel.'. Robert Macfarlane

Sunday, April 7, 2013

In Pursuit of Spring 4, Three Wessex Poets.

Blackmore Vale, Dorset

I had intended to skip this section, a diversion into literary criticism from the journey westwards. But as so often with Edward Thomas, there was more to enjoy and to think about than I had expected.

The three poets chapter moves naturally from the very obscure to the famous - from one Stephen Duck(qui?) to William Barnes, who I've heard of, to Thomas Hardy.

Stephen Duck - well you could have knocked me down with a feather - I found that he features on my favourite pod-cast source, the English Lit Dept, University of Oxford podcasts, Great Writers Inspire Series! (Yes I 'm a Eng Lit junkie) . So you can hear a short lecture about him right now should you wish, but I'll focus on what Thomas had to say.

'Briefly, in 1730, the most talked about poet in England was an agricultural labourer. The story of Stephen Duck is a remarkable one, as the title page of the unauthorised collection of his verse, Poems on Several Subjects, explains. He was 'lately a poor Thresher in a Barn in the County of Wilts, at the Wages of Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week' until his poems
"were publickly read by The Right Honourable the Earl of Macclesfield, in the Drawing-Room at Windsor Castle, on Friday the 11th of September, 1730, to her Majesty. Who was thereupon most graciously pleased to take the Author into her Royal Protection, by allowing him a Salary of Thirty Pounds per Annum, and a small House at Richmond in Surrey, to live in, for the better Support of Himself and Family."'

I remembered that Thomas had written appreciatively, in 'A Literary Pilgrim in England', about John Clare, much better known, for me, as a farm-worker-poet, 'goose-tending at seven, threshing and following the plough before he was in his teens.'
Duck was born almost a century earlier and was perhaps unfortunately constrained by the then current 'Pastoral' tradition to write about nymphs and shepherds with fancy names rather than what he might have written using his own experience. Sometimes he could, as in his description of threshing, so that Thomas says,'Somethings he did write that were true and were unlikely to have been written by anyone else. If he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and kept to the slighted homely style...Instead of merely writing as if he had been to Oxford, he might have reached men's ears.'
Then there is William Barnes, always called the Dorset dialect poet - I recall he has a statue in Dorchester.
I knew this one - but in another guise entirely - the rather lovely Linden Lea.

William Barnes

My Orcha’d in Linden Lea.

.

'Ithin the woodlands, flow’ry gleäded,

By the woak tree’s mossy moot,

The sheenèn grass-bleädes, timber-sheäded,

Now do quiver under voot;

An’ birds do whissle over head,
An’ water’s bubblèn in its bed,
An’ there vor me the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

I be free to goo abrode,
Or teäke ageän my hwomeward road
To where, vor me, the apple tree
Do leän down low in Linden Lea.

The 'standardised' version has music by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. You can hear it on YouTube.

I have been hunting for something else - the words of a 70's sea-side postcard which my children used to recite in as comic a 'Darset' accent as they could - I bet they still remember it - it began

'Ave 'e bin on Darset cliff-tops
Looked on lovely coves(?) below?'

and had an old chap, neckerchief and straw in mouth - what stereotyping went on then. I've always assumed it was William Barnes but can't track it down.
ps Just as I thought, and passing down another generation:

'Here it is - the
postcard's still going strong as I think Izi and Felix once sent me one. And yes
I do know the words! deborah x
'

Maybe not Barnes after all. The first card keeps disappearing - so trying

Edward Thomas comments that Barnes was in fact a schoolteacher, then a clergyman and a pillar of the community - none-the-less he thinks Barnes was right to use the dialect and that the poems have a validity of their own.

another version

Then there's Thomas Hardy

Hardy's birthplace & my own old 'Literary Pilgrim' book

What immediately struck me was the date Thomas was writing, Spring 1913.
The poems of Hardy's that he was considering couldn't include what most people regard as Hardy's best, the 'Emma poems' of 1912 - 13, poems of grief and remorse following the death of his wife whom he 'd come to neglect and despise. I assume that Edward never saw them, published as they were in Moments of Vision, 1917. I think he would have understood only too well.

Young Emma

His comments on the poems he has - the Dynasts and the satires, chiefly, relate to what he calls an 'obsession' with the' blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature and the insignificance of Man, crawling in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither and thither .' He deplores this emphasis in Hardy.

This made me think immediately of a poem of Thomas's - it appears in my novel:

'He thought of his sonnet written a year before,
February Afternoon, where ploughing still continued in spite of war. It was
true even here: a few elderly men were still ploughing in the fields nearby,
following the ancient boundaries. Man and the plough and the gulls and
starlings that followed them had existed for a thousand years and would for
another thousand, while wars were fought and an indifferent, stone-deaf,
stone-blind God looked down on it all. 'But now, perhaps because of what he knew of war, Thomas seems to be taking the same position.Poems:February AfternoonMEN heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw, A thousand years ago even as now, Black rooks with white gulls following the ploughSo that the first are last until a cawCommands that last are first again,--a law Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how A thousand years might dust lie on his browYet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.
Time swims before me, making as a day A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,And God still sits aloft in the array That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.

And Hardy's, The Voice or Woman much missed

Woman much missed, how you
call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as
you were
When you had changed from the
one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day
was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let
me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near
to the town
Where you would wait for me:
yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue
gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in
its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead
to me here,
You being ever dissolved to
wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or
near?

Thus I; faltering
forward,

Leaves around me
falling,
Wind oozing thin through the
thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
-------------------------------------------------------

Publishing Matters - a surprise sent on to me by Frank Egerton.

'Guardian Books, 5th April 2013:Reader reviews roundup

A biographical novel about the poet Edward Thomas

Bardly behaved? … Edward Thomas. Photograph: EO Hoppe/Corbis

Hello and welcome back to our reader reviews roundup, which returns after a two-week easter break. Though the books desk might have been slacking, our reader reviewers have not.

One of the liveliest conversations has been inspired by a novel about the poet Edward Thomas. It was published in February by the Oxfordshire-based "micro-publisher" Streetbooks, whose founder Frank Egerton says: "My interest is in artisan publishing: which involves high quality, regional fiction, marketed locally in person and globally via the Internet. An analogy I like is that of the micro-brewery: a combination of tradition, passion and the opportunities offered by new technology."

Frank of StreetBooks.com

A Conscious Englishman is by former teacher and probation officer Margaret Keeping, and either she has some very conscientious literary friends or her publisher's micro-brewery policy is producing some pretty heady results in the Edward Thomas fan club.
First to review it was ISWilton, who wrote:

What I love most about this book is the voice of his wife Helen. Much of the book is told from her viewpoint and we understand the pain of being married to a struggling, and sometimes, difficult artist.

Her gift is to create in prose the landscapes and moods which Thomas captured in his poems. In showing us the genesis of 'The Manor Farm', 'Old Man', 'In Memoriam (Easter 1915)', she sends us straight back to the poetry, and for a writer who loves Thomas's work, what finer service could she render?
Definitely worth checking out then.'
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About Me

"Start with the Poems, but 'A Conscious Englishman' is a worthwhile addition to the secondary literature".
I'm a former English teacher and Probation Officer, living in Oxford with my husband artist Marc Thompson.